There seems to be a lot of misinformation about Apple’s stance in this thread.<p>Apple explicitly allows and provides APIs to develop content blockers.<p>Apple does not allow content blocking through custom VPN implementations, seemingly because these a) introduce a performance impact, b) may be confusing for users as it’s abusing the point of VPNs, and c) may allow more easy abuse, as VPNs can do a lot more than just block content. This is what the article linked as evidence for Apple’s policy covers, and the statement provided by Apple, while not especially clear, does match up with this.<p>I think the title should be reverted to remove Apple, as they do allow ad blockers on the store (I personally use 1BlockerX <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/1blocker-x/id1365531024?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/1blocker-x/id1365531024?mt=8</a> )
I am moving towards the much more radical solution of blocking advertising supported sites entirely.<p>I am not against advertising in general. It doesn't bug me that there are ads for car dealerships on TV, but the flood of personal injury lawyer ads damages the perceived legitimacy of the government and social system. (As well as the many other ads that are not aimed at getting people to spend their own money but instead to get benefits such as the "Medicare Advantage" scam.)<p>Web advertising and other distractions (pop ins, "will you let this site make notifications?", Taboolah, Outbrain, "This web site uses cookies...", 20 email messages a day about IBM Cloud outages that didn't affect me, "GDPR is here and our policy has changed...") are immediately harmful in terms of cognitive load (lowers effective IQ,) stress, mistakes, missed appointments, opportunities, bills not paid on time because you had to delete 200 spam messages and accidentally deleted something important. That and the phone that never stops ringing with somebody who wants to lower my interest rates...<p>I think long term you are training your brain to not accept the cues that "something is important". After 20 or 30 years of that who knows what that will do you? (Whenever I show my wife something from a porno site she can't see the content in the midst of all the lurid and animated advertising.)<p>It is like Milo Yiannopoulos; it looks like communication but it is better to think about it as noise, static, or nerve gas.
So, my next smartphone will be iPhone, even if I prefer open source. AdBlockers are just too important. Not only they protect your privacy, but they also stop some malware programs that use ads for spreading. And don't Google & Amazon already make 30% from app sales?
In my home network, I run <a href="https://pi-hole.net" rel="nofollow">https://pi-hole.net</a> on a Raspberry Pi that is plugged into a USB port in the wall where it can't be seen.
Almost all generic ads are blocked and those that do get through can easily be blacklisted. No need for any help from Apple/Google/Amazon. I wish I could somehow make it portable.
> They need to realize that it is your device, your personal data, and it is you who should be in control.<p>The idea is sound but it doesn't apply to Amazon, or Google's stores. They're under no obligation to host any app in particular and it should be expected that apps that bite the hand that feeds them would be quickly removed.
IMO there's a moral problem with ad blocking, which is that it's basically stealing.<p>Like it or not, many popular websites and services online gain income from advertising. By using them while blocking their ads you're basically getting something for nothing by gaming the system. It's probably against their ToS (but who reads that right?). It probably says: We serve ads. If you don't like that don't use this site.<p>One might say that ads are distracting, annoying, resource heavy, and sometimes downright malicious. I think so too. However that is essentially the "price" of ads, and this price is known in advance. Blocking ads for these reasons while continuing to use the sites is not unlike eating at a restaurant and leaving without paying because you think their prices are exorbitant: It might seem morally justified but it's theft because the prices were known in advance.<p>I think one of the main reason people don't dine-and-run (yet install adblockers) is that it's hard to do a moral wrong so close to the source, e.g seeing the waiters, being there in person, risking an unpleasantness drama, etc. (This is well known psychological phenomenon which name I can't recall.) In contract installing an adblocker is fast and feels totally unrelated to the 2nd party. It makes it easy to feel like you're fighting the bad guys (ads and the terrible ad-tech) and forget whose revenue you are withholding for your own benefit.<p>Personally I resisted installing adblockers for a long time though eventually I caved in (ad-tech got really bad). I honestly don't know what the solution is.
I don't know anything about AdGuard in particular, but the general category of "Adblocker that is a really a VPN that really just loads a DNS server to block ads" is really problematic as:<p>- cause lots of weird networking issues (impacting perceived stability)<p>- are often "Free" b/c they are swapping in their own ads and malware [1]<p>- are just in general a poor way of loading a hosts/dns file that in many cases they don't even own (they're just pointing to a freely available one)<p>1 - <a href="https://www.cloudwards.net/worst-free-vpn/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudwards.net/worst-free-vpn/</a>
I am running pi-hole at home and push out that pihole DNS to my VPN clients and my phone is always connected to my VPN. I never trusted any of these phone platforms to do anything in my best interest anyway.<p>Related, I cannot wait for the Librem 5
Last time I looked at a “system-wide” adblocker, it was just a vpn service with proxied your traffic (not just DNS) through a who-knows-what server. That seemed really sketchy to me, and I doubt most users knew the implications of it.
Bans like this seems to increase the opportunity/value for "alternate" app stores outside the recommended vendor, offering things that the vendor wont.<p>EDIT: Point is that many apps receive a ban because they conflict with the interest of the phone vendor, but they can still be of great use to users.
I think ads are just fact of life nowadays and not necessarily a bad thing. Ads shouldn't be annoying nor should they be creepy. Like for example, if you google tips to lose weight, you shouldn't be bombarded by pictures of half naked dudes with six pack abs. Nor should you be seeing things you buy frequently due to the fact that you used an in-store membership card.
I wish Google, Facebook and Apple would provide a way to say what kind of ads they'd like to see. Like I have no problem in seeing ads related to cool kickstarter projects, music equipment, tech devices, software development related tools, etc etc.<p>I mean sometimes that is what I only see and i am like happy with the fact that I am forced to see ads. And then other times I am starting to see things that I really don't care about simply because I had a whim to go down some rabbit hole on Google.<p>I think some developers use ads very responsibly and I think that overall denying those developers the right to generate money off your usage prevents them from growing their business and creating better products. I tend to think of flappy bird when I think of great ad placement. The ads don't get in the way of the game. They don't pop up while you are in mid game to try and trick you into clicking. They only appear after you died and they aren't full screen and annoying with a tiny little x you might miss.<p>I mean that is the kind of ads that I can live with and I think everybody else should have to live with too. Hell I even might give them a click every now and then despite the fact that I am not interested in buying the advertised product.<p>I just think of it like throwing some change in the hat of a busking street artist. It's the least I could do to encourage them to continue pursuing their art.
The only way to consume content the way <i>you</i> want to on locked-down devices is to basically MITM your traffic and run it through something like Proxomitron[1] or Proximodo[2].<p>I continue to find it ironic that the very same technology, often detested in discussions here, and present in the middleboxes that companies use to block/filter/inspect the traffic between their networks and the Internet, can also be used under your control to enhance your computing experience. I believe that everyone should have complete ability to modify the traffic that flows to/from the devices they own, and this is something which those who strongly support making connections "more secure" and harder to MITM often fail to consider.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo</a> (Japanese)
I use a VPN service that happens to include an ad blocking feature. I wonder if that will be blocked too? It's PIA, which is very popular.<p>Of course the feature goes unused; I simply refuse to install an application that includes advertising code. Instead, if available, I pay for the ad-free version of the app. Bonus points if that's the only option. The play store helpfully points out most advertising built into apps, so this is pretty easy to do. Combined with Firefox for Android which lets me run uBlock Origin, I have a completely ad-free mobile experience.
Don't system wide ad blockers rely on using a VPN to block ad traffic? Wouldn't that mean that you could just install the OpenVPN app and use a special ad-blocking proxy?
System-wide Adblocker at the Apple App Store that doesn't exist according to the article:<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id69121579?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id69121579?mt=8</a><p>Creates a fake VPN that does the filtering
At home, I just block ads and the DNS level. Run dnsmasq, send all known ad serving domains to 0.0.0.0, and have DHCP point clients’ DNS to your dnsmasq server. Done! Site-wide ad blocking that works on all clients and platforms, without a VPN and without permission from any vendor.
How hard is it really to run your own VPN from home, connect to it from iOS and have your home VPN block ads?<p><a href="https://github.com/BobNisco/adblocking-vpn" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BobNisco/adblocking-vpn</a><p>Why trust a third party that can monitor your traffic?
For those on Android, here's a great one that's open source. Get it on F-Droid, XDA, or build from source:
<a href="https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66</a>
I don't mind advertising...<p>I just object to how advertisers screw things up. Moving text while I'm reading. Hijacking the page and navigating away. Auto-playing loud videos.<p>(These problems are really symptoms of poor design in JavaScript)<p>All I want is a good ad blocker for my mobile browser!
How can an app block ads system wide? I would have thought that apps are sandboxed. Just less strictly then websites.<p>Can an app intercept the network communication at will? Can an app call any operation system function?
I use AdGuard and it is great. It is not only ads that I happily block, but all the analytic, it is unbelievable all the requests that are made by apps, even when not using them.
That's an unpopular opinion but I am ok with that.<p>I would rather pay for the apps I use (with money, not eyeball time) than continue this course to the bottom.
I mean, you could just not use apps that rely on ads for revenue.<p>I personally like getting paid for my work, and being able to buy food and pay rent.
I use ad blockers since forever, howver I just find it extremely mean and unethical that a company like Adguard makes profit by depraving others from their lawful profits by blocking ads. Ad blocking by its nature should not be commercialized.